A little over a week has passed since SUNY New Paltz President Darrell P. Wheeler called 150 police officers to remove protestors at the Palestine-solidarity encampment on the campus’ Parker Quad. As the police formed a line to push demonstrators off the lawn, they arrested, as per the sheriff’s office, 132 protestors, the vast majority of them students.

Since the events of just after midnight on Thursday, May 2, students, faculty, community members, and administration are grappling with how to deal with the many and varied impacts of a police action without precedent in the college’s almost-200-year history.

In the days following the forced removal, students at the scene said they were recovering from the incident and trying to process what had happened to them.

“I woke up in the morning and my entire arm was numb. I can still barely feel it. I tried to flex my wrist and shocks of pain go right up my body,” said Vivienne Knouse-Frenzer, a student organizer and second-year creative writing major. Knouse-Frenzer was zip-tied and handcuffed by police units while arrested for her participation in the demonstration.

“I thought I was fine mentally up until Friday night. I went back to revisit Parker Quad to sit down in the spot that I was violently pulled and dragged from and I immediately had a panic attack. I just started crying uncontrollably,” Knose-Frenzer said.

“I'm bruised up. Physically I was in a lot of pain,” says a student organizer in the college’s Latin & Caribbean Studies department who requested their name be withheld for fear of retaliation.

The student motioned to four bruises covering their arm. “They were grabbing me, knee on my back when they were arresting me,” says the student. “In an act of resistance, I was ready to piss myself in that police van, but these guys noticed that I really needed to pee and they were like, ‘You gotta do what you got to do. Go piss yourself, right now.’”

“I feel very weird after that.” said the student. “Physically, my arm hurts, bladder hurts or whatever but those are temporary, but having this encounter with police on such an extreme level was mentally jarring and memorable. … “I think personally it's a way to mask anti-Palestine rhetoric. First it’s ‘we're anti-tent,’ but once the tents come down, it becomes anti-something else. In the end, the only consistent thing is an anti-Palestine kind of perspective.”

As criticism of the police response intensified over last weekend, Ulster County Sheriff Juan Figueroa on Monday evening released a statement on the encampment via the sheriff’s office Facebook page. “On May 1, 2024, at SUNY New Paltz campus, a group of demonstrators violated campus rules and protocols by establishing an unauthorized encampment … Law enforcement entered the area and arrested 132 individuals without resorting to pepper spray and tasers. During the arrests, batons were displayed but not used to strike individuals … conversely, demonstrators retaliated by throwing glass bottles at officers, injuring one Trooper who required hospitalization.”

According to Figueroa’s statement, demonstrators resisted by throwing glass bottles. This Wednesday, one student was arrested by state police on a felony assault charge for allegedly throwing a metal Gatorade bottle at an officer at the encampment, troopers said. The bottle, which struck the trooper in the face resulted in a laceration above his eye, requiring several stitches. The student’s bail was set at $5,000 cash. New Paltz Deputy Mayor Alexandria Wojcik and some student protestors have since claimed that the water bottle was plastic; Wojcik has also called for an investigation into the incident.

Some protestors offered accounts of the use of police force that contradicted Figueroa’s statements that minimal force was used against them. “One of my friends has 10 staples in his head because the police just struck him,” said a college senior who also requested anonymity. “My right wrist is pretty messed up.”

Mia Altamuro, a junior majoring in Journalism and Communications, recalled experiencing “degrading” behavior from officers during her arrest. “I just completely blacked out. I was grabbed by a couple of men and I just started screaming because, for me, it's very traumatic to be grabbed by adult men. They told me to get up and they pulled me off the ground, and then I was put in the zip ties and walked away,” she says.

“I walk outside and I don't even want to enter that part of campus anymore,” Altamuro added. “I did the morning after and I just started crying because it was just all the destroyed art and belongings.”

On Friday morning, a bulldozer was called onto Parker Quad by administration, collecting student belongings such as bedding, laptops, cellphones, food and supplies and discarding the majority in a dumpster behind the South Classroom Building.

Lilly Sabella, a student reporter at the New Paltz Oracle who covered the encampment on the ground but did not participate, recalls her experience. “There was a point where the police charged and the officer pushed his baton into my chest like, pretty harshly, into my ribs. I managed to stay on my feet.”

“I was yelling that I was press,” Sabella said. “He said something along the lines of, ‘Good. So move.”

A Spectrum News journalist was arrested on the scene while covering the encampment. Neither of the student reporters from The Oracle were arrested.

“There's just a lot of fatigue in my body,” says Lucas Jackson-Peterka, a student organizer and junior at SUNY New Paltz. “Physically, I have one leg and I have welts all over the place and sometimes they'll bleed. It's just been really, really painful. I wake up super early all the time, usually because I have things to do like write speeches, but also just because there's just so much stress on my body,”

Jackson-Peterka, president of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) chapter at New Paltz, tracked the police vans carrying arrested protestors at the encampment and drove students from various police departments back to their homes following their release. “We arrived around 12:30 in the morning. The first student release was at two in the morning. It was six hours straight of waiting for people asking how they were doing. Everybody, as they came out, was like, shaking,” says Jackson-Peterka.

“The messed-up thing is that this demands urgency and we need to move because the administration has such a backing of funding and time that they can invest into controlling the narrative,” Jackson-Peterka said. “We need to say things and get things moving but everybody is just so tired and stressed out and angry that it's just been really hard to organize.”

Demonstrations have continued across campus and New Paltz in solidarity with the arrested community members and Palestinian people.

Last Friday morning, New Paltz Students for Palestine arranged a walk-out march from the academic quad to the Haggerty Administration Building, where the office of President Darrell P. Wheeler is located. Students peacefully sang, “Solidarity forever, our union makes us strong,” while drafting letters to the administration on their feelings following the crackdown.

On Saturday, a “Community Outrage Demonstration” took place in front of the village’s Elting Memorial Library over, organizers said, “the absurd deployment of riot police on non-violent students and other community members.” At the demonstration, community members old and young, gathered chanting “Free Palestine!” in the heart of the town.

On Monday, Haggerty was the site of another protest, timed to coincide with Wheeler’s “Office Hours With the President.” Approximately a dozen activists, community members, students and faculty assembled on the first floor to talk with Wheeler. The activists wanted to deliver an updated list of demands, which include divesting from companies which they say are “culpable” for acts of “genocide” in Gaza and academic and legal amnesty for anyone at the encampment, and air grievances with college officials’ handling of the encampment and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Wheeler came down to talk with activists for about an hour. Afterwards, student organizers expressed their commitment to the “peaceful yet relentless” pursuit of their demands and their unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Later that evening, Wheeler released a statement titled, “Facing pain, and continuing this work.” An excerpt from the campus-wide email read, “Among my responsibilities in this moment is to hear your voices, to open my head and my heart to better understand the pain and trauma many have experienced these past few months and particularly over the past few days. … This experience is painful for me as well. And while I am working to stay focused on listening to your experiences, I am doing deep soul-searching to understand what more I must do to assist in SUNY New Paltz healing.”

In the days since the encampment, student organizations and faculty have come out in overwhelming support of those arrested, including the Department of Black Studies, Psychological Counseling Center, Fahari Libertad, New Paltz Oracle, History Department, English Department, Sociology Department, Digital Media and Journalism Department, Political Science & International Relations Department, and numerous faculty and alumni. A letter signed by 129 college and faculty and sent to Wheeler and SUNY Chancellor John King decried the police response. “This raises grave issues of freedom of speech and assembly. The police violently broke up a peaceful gathering in a public space on campus,” the letter read. “We may not agree with each other on how to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israel-Hamas war, or the rhetoric the protestors used. But we are clear in our condemnation of the police response as a brutal infringement of First Amendment freedoms.”